2 years old!

46000 members so far, 5000 visitors and 100 translations done everyday. A strong community is born with a common interest in languages.

A huge thanks to experts, administrators and members contributing everyday.

I can't list all the improvements made to the site since the last blog entry. As the experts are the core of the system, all has been done, and will be done to make their work easier. And by the way... we need more experts!

Everyday I'm amazed by the fantastic people we meet on cucumis and that is the true victory!

Happy new year 2007!

A long time since my last post!
There is so much to tell! I will try to do it as quick as possible.

A nice article about cucumis was written by Mickael Arrington founder of the famous techcrunch blog reviewing the new web 2.0 products. Despite the article was quite incomplete about what we are doing here, it was very useful to reveal Cucumis to the entire world. Hundreds of blog articles were posted after this article, Cucumis was even featured on Finnish and French television. I've read many of those articles (those I can understand) and I was very pleased to see that most of the writers who tested the service was very satisfied by the quality of the translations we do here. Congratulations to all translators and, of course, to the great team of experts.

Now the new features.

This is new :
- Until now, cucumis was not designed for people who can't speak a foreign language. Now it is! If you can't translate anything, we give you 300 points every 10 day!
- Who is online, charts about new members every day, and country ratio.
- Translation statistics. Looking at the pie chart of the translations to be evaluated, you can view the languages in which we need experts (Norwegian, Hungarian, Hindi, Swedish, Kurdish, Arabic, Korean, Albanian ...).

This is very new :
All members can now add translations in their favorites. You can view the list of your favorite translations from your profile page, and there is also a top favorite translations list.

This is very very new :
When the experts can't understand the source text of a translation, they still can evaluate the linguistic form of the translation but they can't for the meaning. Now, for the evalutations they can't do alone, they can ask for the opinion of all cucumis.org members. According to the informations of your profile, you will be asked now and then to give your opinion on some translations. After collecting enough votes to make up ones mind, the translation is accepted or rejected.

Major improvements

Hi all, I've added 3 features to Cucumis which are worth being mentioned here.

1. email notification

From now, you can be notified by email when somebody ask for a translation that matches your language preferences. There is a 2 days delay before being notified. This delay give us the time to check the eventual mistakes on the target and source languages and maybe to give the priority to people who often check the website. The functionnality is not fully tested, so you might expect some bugs in the next few weeks.
To use it, simply check the box "Jeg ønsker å bli kontaktet på e-mail når en ny oversettelsessøknad passer til mine språkinstillinger" on the translation homepage, and submit by clicking on the blue arrow.

2. RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

You can now use the RSS format in your favorite RSS reader to be warned about new available translations mathcing your language preferences. On the requested translations pages (for example this one), you can see the rss icon that links to the rss url. Simply add this url in your rss reader to be daily informed about new translation requests.
Using the netvibes start page (netvibes is one of the best rss reader, I recommend it), this is an example of what you can get :

3. administrators and experts

Until now, translations was to be checked one by one and the load was very high for administrators and experts. Now they can check several translations in one click. I hope we can have more translations checked by our talented experts with this new system, and offer better quality to everybody.

That's all

Note that the greek interface has been recently added. Most of the job was done by irini! Thanks!
...and thanks to all contributors!

5000 members

More than 5000 members have registered with cucumis.org and it's the opportunity to remind that without its members cucumis.org is nothing. Thanks to the members who spend part of their spare time for the community and a special thanks to the experts of cucumis, who check and edit all translations to make them as good as possible.
Waiting for the 10000th member, there is a lot of work to do here, making the interface more clear, the search of translations more easy, developing the project section, and the language course section too...

Server crash

The hard disk of the cucumis.org web server has crashed yesterday .

The data were restored from the 9h january. Many translations, messages, wiki articles and members are lost, and I'm sorry for that. All avatars pictures are also lost. I invite deleted members to register again and send a message in the forums to get back their former status (Number of points, Expert rank etc...). All members are invited to request their points back.

I hope it won't happen again as it took me the whole week-end to repair and it's not yet completed.

Happy new year 2006!

Happy new year 2006 to all cucumis.org visitors

What has changed since the last news entry?

- Cucumis.org has grown fast as there are now more than 1900 members and about 20 new members a day. Many new languages have been added to the cucumis.org interface: Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese. A big thanks to the cucumis.org members who translated it.

- The project section is up and running but nobody knows how it works . It's mainly dedicated to webmasters who want to translate their websites. They can submit their text to be translated on cucumis.org and invite their visitors to translate on cucumis.org. Cucumis.org will get new members and the webmasters will be able to use the translation engine of cucumis.org and the expertise of cucumis.org members.

- An affiliation program has been developed to reward those who put a link on their personal websites or blogs to talk about cucumis.org. Instead of using the http://www.cucumis.org/ classic url, you can use this url: [linkid=w_in_[userid]]. Each translation done by a member you sent on cucumis.org through this url, will earn you additional points (5 percent of the translation cost). There is also a similar affiliation link for the webmasters who manage a project on cucumis.org, to invite their visitors to translate their website on cucumis.org, with the same advantages: http://www.cucumis.org/oversettelse_17_w/p_in_myProjectId.html.

- The multi-language Babylon dictionary has been inserted on the translation pages at the bottom of the side menu. It's a very useful tool and it's not intrusive at all.

- The wiki engine has been set. Some parts of the cucumis.org interface, as well as details and tutorials about how the website should be used, are now embedded in wiki articles. Wiki articles are more flexible than the language files of the cucumis.org interface, as they can be edited at any time by any member. The wiki articles of the cucumis.org interface can also be translated from the translation homepage using the link "List of [wiki] translations to be done or updated".

- It's now possible to post comments on all parts of the website, including news and wiki articles.

What's next?

- A language course section is currently under development. Each member of cucumis.org will be able to create a wiki lesson about his favorite language.

- A java applet is under development to offer the possibility to record and play back audio samples for the language courses.

- A java or flash applet will be developed to draw illustrations for the language courses.

- I don't understand why the ratio of members having done at least one translation is so small... Maybe I should try to improve the interface and I need your feed back on this...